The Central Lake County Joint Action Water Agency (CLCJAWA) is composed of 12 communities in Lake County, Illinois. Its only objective is to provide a safe, reliable and economical supply of drinking water to the residents of these communities.
 
In 2005, CLCJAWA was awarded the Phase IV Drinking Water Excellence Award by the Partnership for Safe Water, identifying its staff and facilities as meeting the highest standards for quality in the production and distribution of drinking water. The transformation to an independent award-winning regional drinking water agency took more than a decade of collaboration, planning, construction and upgrading to achieve this status.

To constantly improve water quality, and optimise facility operation, the agency needed to:

•  Replace the obsolete and non-upgradeable supervisory system software.
•  Upgrade the automation controllers at the water treatment plant, and remote sites.
•  Upgrade and expand the electrical power distribution system to accommodate an increase in production capacity.

To qualify for an award from the Partnership for Safe Water, a facility must demonstrate to an independent team of water professionals that all aspects of operation are optimized and reliable. In addition, the plant must prove that it meets specific treatment parameters, requiring an exhaustive means to gather operations data to be in place. The program requires producing water with a turbidity that is fives times lower than what current federal regulations require, which is 0.5 NTU.
 
“In practice, we produce water that is 10 times lower than current federal regulations require, typically below 0.05 NTU” said Burr Koepsel, the agency’s director of operations.

Dave Thompson - CLCJAWA Systems Analyst:
“The Momentum family of PLCs is economical and more than powerful enough for our delivery structure application.
Communication failures due to problems with the phone lines are no longer the problem they used to be because the PLCs have been programmed to store two months of data-specific flow data that is accessible remotely.“
 

"We chose Square D electrical distribution products for our upgrade because they were part of the plant’s existing infrastructure and had proven their reliability. The extra coordination and diligence of the Schneider Electric
engineering staff during the project only enhanced our confidence in the company.”

Over the past decade, three main steps can be noticed:

•  the SCADA System upgrade,
•  the Control Optimization, and
•  the improvement of the Electrical Distribution System.

•  SCADA SYSTEM UPGRADE

By 1998, CLCJAWA felt limited by its original SCADA system. The hardware of the UNIX-based proprietary system was obsolete and not upgradeable. In addition, the agency was using the system to its highest capacity, updating 6,000 data points every 10 seconds and storing up to 18 months of data. The agency even had to delete functions to prevent lock-ups. The SCADA software had information databases that were not easily imported into other applications, difficult historical database retrieval and limited options for report generation.
 
The CLCJAWA wanted to move to a PC-based SCADA structure to make expanding and upgrading simpler. The agency chose CitectSCADA software from Citect, a brand of Schneider Electric, and installed it on PCs. The software met the agency’s data storage, redundancy and speed requirements, while providing easy integration of historical and real-time data into spreadsheets, report generators and more. Furthermore, the agency liked that the system could integrate power monitoring data to provide energy-use reports, runtimes, number of starts, etc.
 
The system has a total of 8,000 tags of its 15,000 tag licenses in use, allowing the plant to almost double in size before requiring a SCADA upgrade. The system consists of two redundant input/output (I/O) servers to handle the critical I/O and another I/O server to handle noncritical I/O. It has 10 view licenses and two manager nodes that float as needed. The 8,000 points of data are scanned at a rate of 6,000 points every 10 seconds and enter the system through a variety of means.
 

•  CONTROL OPTIMIZATION

As CLCJAWA began the process of upgrading its SCADA system, it decided to also address challenges with the PLC portion of its control system. The agency decided to replace the existing PLCs with 23 Modicon Quantum processors while maintaining the same I/O. In some locations, a hot standby system was implemented. The new PLCs utilize IEC 61131-3 programming standards and communicate to the SCADA system via a Modbus Plus communication network. They are able to handle the communication speed required by the facility, providing a more detailed view into daily plant operations. The Quantum PLCs also can be directly interfaced to the existing I/O racks, reducing costs and providing a clear path for future migration.
 
More than 300 lines of ladder logic in one PLC were replaced with six derived function blocks that ran an entire feed system. Utilizing structured tag names allowed the balance of the five feed system’s to be programmed in less than an hour by copying and pasting and then utilizing search and replace functions. CLCJAWA also replaced its limited logic and memory RTUs with compact Modicon Momentum PLCs.